Book Review: Uncommon Sense
Book Author: Barbara Oakley
Uncommon sense is a fantastic book on teaching (and learning) based on the content from Barbara Oakley’s wildly popular course on learning.
It talks through techniques that the latest research on learning has born out and shows how many of our current societal habits create anti-learning.
Takeaways:
- the best form of learning is active recall which can take the form of Anki decks, pausing and reflecting on what you read without looking at it, doing problems without example solutions in front of you, and applying the information – the point is your brain has to do work with the information to integrate the information which may seem obvious but more often people study by highlighting or rereading passages or working through problems with example problems right in front of them – plugging values into a template does not facillitate learning!
- sleep is vital to learning and learning needs to be spaced out over time because the brain needs time to wire together. The hippocampus stores indexes to information in the brain, but it needs time to transfer that information into long term storage
- the average ‘chunks’ of information in working memory that can be held is four
- having more knowledge in long term memory can make your working memory seem bigger
- there is huge variety in working memory sizes in children and yet school lumps them all together – no wonder some who are a bit behind in development get left behind
- exercise is vital to learning because it stiumlates the growth of neurons and primes them for connection – so recess or exercise is more valuable than replacing it with an hour in the classroom
- pausing, even for 15 seconds to ‘micro’ rest helps information consolidate after learning
- there are two parts to learning: learn it and link it
- learn it is loading some new information into working memory
- link it is integrating it with the existing information
- my mental image of this is imagining what you know like a lego landscape and new information is like a piece that’s getting lowered in, only it might now quite fit so before it can get ‘locked in’ and click you have to build up some sections and tear down some sections to make a ‘dock point’ for that new information